Pulses
by Cascade Waters
Summary: Time is running out, and with every beat of another's heart his destiny closes in.
1. Default Chapter

Pulses  
  
By Cascade firechild@post.com  
  
Rated G  
  
Spoilers: Exodus, Exile, Phoenix  
  
Disclaimers: I don't own them, I get no money for them, 'nuff said.  
  
Feedback: PLEASE!!!! Okay, I'll calm down now. As a good friend of mine says, feedback is like air to an author. Please donate to my breathing fund.  
  
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Quiet lay over the Kent home like a blanket, warm against the cool October night. In this time between the calling of the insects and the singing of the birds, the stillness seemed fragile, almost enchanted… and wrong.  
  
Jonathan Kent turned his head and opened one eye, looking at the glowing blue numbers on his new digital alarm clock.   
  
1:40 A.M.  
  
He didn't know what had woken him, but he wished it hadn't. In the two weeks since Clark had come home, grounded and ashamed and fighting depression, Jonathan and Martha had gotten more rest than in the past three months, but these days nothing seemed to chase the tiredness from his bones. Trained from long habit to sleep hard and deep, he knew that nothing short of a twister should have roused him from a dead slumber. He glanced over and saw that Martha, his beautiful flame-haired angel, slept soundly, a faint smile playing on her lips. So it wasn't a noise; he realized belatedly that whatever had disturbed him was something deeper.  
  
Jonathan eased himself to a sitting position, silently slipping his feet into his old sneakers, reaching for his robe to cover his cotton pants and white tank. He stood gingerly, picked up his flashlight and shotgun, blew a kiss at Martha, and started his old patrol. He hadn't surveyed the house at night like this since Clark had been eleven and they'd gotten word of a serial child killer on the loose in the area. It didn't matter to Jonathan that his son's developing strength and speed would probably have saved him from real harm; he could deal with the unique challenges of having a superkid, but his paternal instincts told him to protect his child as though the boy was normal. Those instincts were now telling him that something was out of place.  
  
Jonathan watched the shadows on the walls for a few moments, nodding to himself when they didn't move. He moved down the hallway, past the small guest/sewing room, the head of the stairs, a linen closet, Clark's bathroom, and stopped at his son's bedroom door. Hand on the doorknob, Jon recalled how many times he'd been in this room in the two years since they'd moved Clark into it from the smaller room--he smiled slightly at the memory of the broken bed and Clark's sheepish expression; winced as he remembered lecturing the teenager about throwing parties and leaving the house; closed his eyes and sighed as he thought of how many times he'd entered the too-still sanctum over the summer, searching futilely for any little clue, hearing echoes of a just-changed and still deepening voice, finding one of his own shirts hanging in the closet, picking up the deep blue quilted jacket on the chair and holding it close to his face to breathe in the clean smell of his son.  
  
Shaking his head and sighing again, Jonathan firmly reminded himself that Clark was home and safe and that they were never going to lose him like that again. Everything was fine; his son was in (or possibly above) his bed, fast asleep, just as he should be, and whatever had woken Jon was probably a sign that his instincts were getting soft. He chuckled as he realized that he'd spent so much time with his son in the last two weeks that he was starting to think like him--Jon thought, in Clarkese, that sometimes getting old really bit.  
  
He was still smiling to himself as he quietly opened the door, letting light from his flashlight creep into the miniature disaster area, falling softly across the small piles of clothes, the backpack, the physics book on the nightstand, the empty bed, the chair covered with coats, the mud boots, the…  
  
He jerked the beam back along its path, eyes widening in horror. 


	2. Chapter 2

The empty bed.  
  
Jonathan's mouth worked dryly for a moment, trying to call out for his wife, but then something galvanized in his mind, and he decided that if his son was missing again, he would just have to find him and bring him home again--as many times as it took for Clark to understand that he had one real father, and that that father would not tolerate running away.  
  
The farmer turned around, his jaw working, and surveyed the hallway once more before heading for the stairs, which he descended quickly, skipping over the three steps he'd jimmied to squeak after they'd discovered that Clark could sleepwalk. It occurred to him now that his son's absence could be just another incidence of sleepwalking, in which case Clark could be anywhere in the county, although Jon suspected now that his instincts were still sharp and that Clark had only been gone for a few minutes. Even a thought as innocent as sleepwalking didn't quell the now-familiar fear and hollowness.   
  
Jonathan was scanning the yard though the kitchen window, digging in Martha's bit drawer for a box that even she didn't know he'd stashed there, and mentally thinking of what he'd do if he found his son sleepwalking or if he found him awake and running away out of shame, when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He froze for a moment, then slowly turned his head to scour the living room with his gaze. A moment ago everything had been still, but now there was a small fire in the fireplace. Trying to push old horror movies out of his mind, he took a slower look around the room. 


	3. Chapter 3

There.  
  
Jonathan straightened, sighing softly in relief. There, on the far end of the couch, was a tight bundle. Jonathan could barely see tousled black hair peeking over the edge of Martha's navy chenille couch throw. He laid the shotgun on the kitchen table and padded over to the couch, leaning over to make sure that it really was Clark.  
  
The teenager was awake, eyes unfocused and gazing into the fire. He was curled into a tight ball on his side, taking up just less than half the couch space, with his head slightly propped on the couch arm. His face was a bit paler than normal, and there were shadows under his eyes; it could have been a trick of the light, but Jonathan could have sworn that Clark's eyes were rimmed with red.  
  
"Son?" Jonathan whispered, eliciting no response. Starting to worry, Jonathan raised his volume just a bit. "Son?"  
  
Clark jumped slightly, then looked up at his father, and it took a moment before he registered recognition. "D-dad. Hi. What are you doing up? Did I wake you up? I tried to be quiet." His whisper was a little slow, like he still hadn't fully re-entered reality. Jonathan had to shake off a sudden vision of his son rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand.  
  
"I was going to ask you the same thing. Why are you down here? Are you feeling okay? And don't worry, you were very quiet; your mother is still asleep. I just… felt something and came to make sure that everything was alright." Jonathan levered himself up onto the couch, scooting his son's feet out of the way  
  
Clark's "Oh" was soft, groggy, and a little awed. He stared at the fire for a moment before shifting to a more or less upright position, turning slightly to look at his father. "You felt something? Did you think someone was breaking in? I tried to be careful moving around, but…"  
  
Jonathan smiled slightly and laid a hand on Clark's shoulder, stilling the boy's apologetic babbling. "It's okay, Clark. No, I didn't think someone was breaking in. I actually felt like I needed to check on you. I needed to make sure that you were okay." His eyes flicked worriedly to his hand and back as he noticed that his son was trembling.  
  
Clark cocked his head, looking at his father in surprise. "You... you sensed me? You sensed something was wrong with me? Really?"  
  
Jonathan smiled again. "Son, let's review a few basic facts here. I'm a father. You're my kid. I have paternal instincts. You do the math. Now," Jon said, changing the subject as he slid his hand underneath the blanket to rest on Clark's back, feeling his son's heart pounding with exertion (just as his own still pounded), "why don't you tell me what's on your mind?"  
  
Clark grimaced, unsure about opening up. He didn't want to bother his father with something that was so… stupid.  
  
Jonathan saw Clark's hesitation, and his voice lowered, his tone carrying a firmness and an edge. "Clark, I'm sorry if this is uncomfortable for you, but I don't like the idea of something chewing at you; we've seen what happens when you bottle it all up inside. You have to let it out, you have to talk to us, and you can't lie to us about stuff that bothers you. We won't go through that again; we can't."   
  
The teenager flushed and winced, feeling a flood of shame wash over him again. He might have let it carry him this time, but he could hear the love in his father's voice, could feel the tenderness and strength and reassurance of his father's hand on his back. It was more than that--there was what he could only describe as a hum in the air, a sort of vibration that he could almost see, faint and familiar, that came only at certain times and only with his father. He'd felt it from time to time when they'd been close like this, and once or twice when they'd been separated. The day his father had shot him, it had been present but increasingly off, creating an almost sickening dissonance that never reached his ears but played deep in his bones. The feeling had left when his father had passed out, and Clark realized that he hadn't felt totally better about it until it came again, in tune, when Clark had fallen ill; he didn't consciously notice the phenomenon until now, but thinking back, the return of the hum in its true form had convinced him that his father would do anything to protect him. The stillness of this night gave him the first chance to notice it, and to wonder if this was his equivalent of what, with most people, would be hairs at the back of the neck rising or the involuntary urge to turn when a certain person entered a room. The hum was there tonight, pure and clear, a feeling of security deep in his bones--or maybe in his soul. He wasn't entirely sure he had a soul or that it would be clean if he did, but he knew that this man sitting next to him would love him regardless. That overcame the shame, if not the remorse for his actions.  
  
Clark looked down at his hands, fiddling with the place where the ring had been. "I… I had a dream. A nightmare. I was down in the caves, going through a bag of money and, I guess, stuff that I'd stolen, and I saw something move, so I looked up; I remember thinking it was probably you and that I was going to be grounded till the end of time. Anyway, it wasn't you--it was a baby--and somehow I knew it was your baby, the one… the one I made Mom lose. So there was this baby, and it started out looking like the dancing baby from the Internet, but then it started to change, see, and suddenly it looked like, well, like you, okay, and it was all cute and everything, but then, well, it opened its mouth and started to talk and…" Clark stopped and heaved a few breaths, visibly disturbed. Jonathan moved his hand, rubbing his son's back reassuringly as he waited.   
  
"Well, anyway," Clark said even more quietly, "it started to talk, but the voice wasn't a baby's--it was Jor-El's voice. And it was mad. Furious. At me. Because if it hadn't been for me, the baby would have been born and would have taken its rightful place as the son of the Kents. It would have had everything I always had, and it would have made Mom and you happy in a way I never could; it would have been your real child. But I killed it. Twice. It said Mom was supposed to have it a long time ago, but then I came and the rocks made her not be pregnant. And then it happened again this May, when she was pregnant and she lost the baby because of my stupidity. It…" His voice got so soft that Jon had to strain to hear him over the subdued crackling of the fire. "It said that I robbed you of the chance to really love a child like you should, and that you could never have connected with me as father and son because I'm not… not right." He lowered his head in defeat. "It said I'm unnatural, a monster and a murderer. And it was right." 


	4. Chapter 4

Jonathan reached over, catching Clark's chin and turning it to face him. "Clark, I know that was intense and painful, but I want you to listen to me, okay? It was just a dream. I know that somewhere inside you there's a little voice that says all of that, and that's what was speaking in your dream; the voice of Jor-El to you represents guilt and anger and frustration, and that's why it's haunting you. But son, I know you, I know who you are, and you are not a monster or a murderer. . Your mother really has only been pregnant once. You are my 'real child,' and I wouldn't trade you for anything. Clark, you know we love you, right?"  
  
Clark nodded, then turned his head away to gaze at the fire again. Jon stayed where he was, certain that the issue wasn't resolved yet. Clark was silent for a few minutes as Jonathan resumed rubbing his back under the blanket. The teenager adjusted his position again slightly before looking at his father. "Dad, I'm… I'm sorry that you missed out on stuff. Like, I'm sorry you didn't really get to do the whole bonding thing."  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"Well," Clark shrugged, "Mom said that fathers bond with their newborns, usually the first time they rock them or hold them or spend time alone with them. She said it gives the dad a place in the child's life and the child a place in the father's reality, or something. Moms can bond pretty much any time, for some reason. But I guess since I wasn't a baby, you kinda got gypped. If you'd had your own kid, you could have done that."  
  
Jonathan turned sideways and sat forward, leaning toward Clark, suddenly understanding that it was guilt driving his son's distress. He understood, but he didn't like it and he wasn't going to let it eat his son. "Son, look at me please." Clark didn't respond. Jon's tone firmed a bit. "Clark, turn around here and look at me." The teenager turned uneasily, keeping the blanket around him like a shell. He kept his head down. Jonathan reached out and rested his hands on Clark's shoulders, then, when Clark refused to look up, he caught his chin firmly but gently and tilted it upward. Jonathan's eyes locked onto Clark's and held.  
  
"Clark, listen to me, and listen good. This has got to stop. Nothing that happened when you were so young is your fault--not the meteor shower, not the deaths or the strange effects on people, not the struggles we had trying to have a baby--none of it. You understand? You were a blessing to us, a gift when we thought we'd been forgotten. Your mother and I couldn't have asked for a better child. You didn't cheat either of us out of anything; we have more than we'd ever dreamed. And I want you to stop beating yourself up for all the things you couldn't prevent, and start concentrating on what you can create--the best you you can be. Do you understand me?" He waited for a response. "Clark Jerome Kent, do you understand?" Clark's eyes widened; his father only called him by his full name on rare occasions, when Jonathan was beyond 'meaning business.' The teenager nodded slowly, and the hand on his jaw suddenly went from stern to cradling. Jon's fingers lingered there for a moment or two before he relaxed, still gazing at his son. "And actually," Jon said, his gaze becoming reminiscent, "you and I did bond."  
  
"We did?"  
  
Jonathan nodded, eyes drifting to the fire as he smiled softly. "For about three days after you first came to us, the excitement of a new place with new, well, everything was enough to wear you out thoroughly. But about the fourth night that you were here, you got restless and fussy. You weren't whiny, but you were obviously uncomfortable, and of course we couldn't stand to see you like that. We tried everything--food, water, warm milk, warm bath, stories, a nightlight, no light at all; nothing soothed you. It was like you just could not get satisfied, and you wanted so badly to tell us what was wrong but you didn't know how.   
  
"Finally, in total frustration and helplessness, I sent your mother to bed and I picked you up and carried you down here and sat down in the old recliner. I sat you on my lap and looked at you and played like I was talking to one of the animals, and you seemed faintly amused by that. I thought that was a step in the right direction. You kept looking at me with these huge, clear eyes that said you were just calmly waiting for me to do whatever it was that needed doing, and I swore I could hear what was probably my own little-kid voice in my head, saying, 'Daddy, fix it, make it better!' I didn't know what to do to help you, and I hate not knowing what to do, but I knew it wasn't your fault you couldn't communicate, so I finally pulled you close and laid you against my chest and rocked. You wiggled a little bit but not too much. It just seemed too quiet, somehow, like the stillness was pressing against my ears, so I started to talk or sing or something, just real quietly. I'm pretty sure I remember singing at least a couple of the songs I liked, and I think I talked for awhile--stuff that didn't really matter to you, like crop rotations and which animals were likely to bear good stock that year and what I could save up to get for your mom for Christmas, but it was something to hold off the silence and to give you an idea of what a conversation would be. I kept rocking, kept talking and singing, and every fifteen or twenty minutes I'd get up and walk you around the room. I didn't really expect it to work, just to keep you calm, but after about an hour and a half I looked down and you were dozing lightly. I was so tired that I was afraid I would pass out, so I finally laid down on this couch with you in my arms; I kept talking because I didn't know if you'd wake up if I stopped.   
  
"Your mom found us the next morning, me on my back on the couch with one leg off the edge and the other hanging over that arm you're up against now, and you sprawled on your tummy on my chest, fast asleep with your mouth open. I guess by the time I stopped talking you were so far gone that you didn't notice.   
  
"Your mom and I talked that day, and it took us a few hours to figure out what had happened: you had spent probably two years alone inside a tiny pod, hurtling though billions of miles of space, and that's all you knew. So when it came to sleeping here, you couldn't get settled because everything was wrong to you--especially the feel. We figured that the little ship must have been in a constant state of vibration, even if it was too faint to feel, and so you had a hard time adjusting to lying still in a bed that didn't move. You used to get as close as you could to us when we spoke, so you could feel the vibrations the sounds made; you did it with your mom, who taught you most of your speech skills, but since my voice was deeper and my chest was bigger, you found some comfort in the vibrations I made by vocalizing. It was all so simple, really, that I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.   
  
"We had to teach you to sleep in your bed, but let me tell you, it wasn't easy. I did that every night for about two weeks, and each night I would shorten the time, trying to kind of wean you off of the vibration. I could get frustrated and irritated with you during the day, not knowing how to communicate with you and still getting used to having a small person who didn't know about privacy or respect or consideration, but to be real honest, when night fell and the house was quiet, and it was just you and me together, I didn't want to let go of you. It was really the only time I got alone with you, the only time when I got to feel you in my arms and breathe you in and see the trust in your eyes.   
  
"After a few nights, I kept you in your room while I held you. We'd done what we could to make the room comfortable for you, using blue and gray from inside your pod and mixing them with bright red and yellow from the land around us. We'd been given a toddler bed and your mother made sheets for it, and the ladies from the church of Christ in town had donated a little blue and white quilt and a handmade stuffed lamb."  
  
Clark smiled, amazed at the thought. "Really? A stuffed lamb?"  
  
"Yep. It was real soft, made out of flannel. It was two shades of blue, and you loved it. Your mom was teaching you sounds, and you called the lamb 'Ba Ba.' You wore that thing smooth in places; you played with it, slept with it, rubbed on it, occasionally nibbled on it, and I'm sure that at some times when you were alone, you cried on it. When we were first bonding, you had just gotten it, and you thought it was so soft that you wanted it with you all the time, so I'd wrap you in the quilt and hand you the lamb, and we'd sit in the rocker your mom had dragged in and I'd rock you and sing to you. We got close enough for you to tell me which songs were your favorites; you found a way to tell me that you didn't like most of the stuff from the 60s, but you loved Here Comes the Sun and Puff the Magic Dragon and American Pie. And your favorite song was That's My Job. I must have done that one fifty times in two weeks, and probably close to a hundred over the next couple of years, when you were too young to be embarrassed.  
  
"Anyway, one morning, after a particularly rough night, your mother found us on your bed, me on my back and you on my chest. She came in to cover us up and rearrange us so that we could sleep comfortably while she took over the chores, but something odd happened. When she put one hand on your back and the other on my wrist, so she could lift my hand and move you and then put my hand back on your back, she felt something. She had to check to be sure, so she found the pulse points on our necks and concentrated on them for a couple of minutes, and she was amazed." Jonathan looked into his son's eyes again as he continued, his voice soft and gentle and filled with wonder. 


	5. Chapter 5

"Our pulses matched. Of course your heart beat two or three times for every one of mine, but our rhythm matched. Perfectly. She said it was actually a little creepy at first, but as she thought about it, she began to feel that it meant that we were supposed to be the ones to find you, that you belonged with us. It was like you were born for us. Oh, we knew that you were your own person, and we never thought of you as an object, but parents own their children in a special way, totally respectful and almost holy. Alien or not, accident or not, you'd come to us, and you were our child. You are our child. She bonded with you in a precious way, teaching you to accept your new world and deal with it, always making sure that you had good food and clean clothes and that she spent a good part of every day touching and hugging and talking to you. And I bonded with you by giving you a bridge between your old world--your little ship--and your new world--our family. And whenever you and I fight or I get angry or frustrated with you, or I don't know how to connect with you, I think back to a time when you and I couldn't talk to each other at all but we knew each other because our hearts beat together." Jon shrugged, looking off into the fire again, looking vaguely embarrassed but not a bit ashamed for saying these things to his son. He'd made a promise long ago, and renewed it again when Clark had vanished, that for every day he had with his child, he would not back down or wimp out of telling Clark how much he loved him or how precious he was. Time was too short to waste on discomfort and machismo. And, strangely, these were the times when he was most secure as a man.  
  
Clark was smiling faintly, and he had a glint in his eye that had nothing to do with the waning fire. "Dad? Our heartbeats really matched?'' Jon turned his head to nod at him, fighting the urge to float away to sleep on his memories. "Then can I let you in on something?" Clark tentatively reached out, taking his father's left hand and slowly pulling it toward him, laying it flat on his own chest, so that Jon's fingertips pointed toward Clark's chin and the center of Jon's palm laid over Clark's heart. At the same time, Clark stretched out his left hand and placed it over his father's heart, creating a nexus. "I think they still do."   
  
Clark's eyes shown as his smile widened. This time their pulses matched perfectly, one to one, as if they existed on the same vein.   
  
Jonathan smiled and chased down a yawn. Clark unfolded himself and went to put another log on the fire, then came back to find that Jon had taken Clark's spot. Jon grinned up at his son and held out one arm; Clark climbed onto the couch and settled in against his father's strong arm and side, pulling his knees up to his chest and offering part of the blanket to Jon. Jonathan took the end of the blanket and draped it behind himself, then reached over and tucked the rest of it around his son, keeping his arm between the blanket and the thick weave of Clark's henley. He gently stroked his son's back and side, not even fully aware that he was doing so. Clark tentatively laid his head on his father's shoulder and closed his eyes; as he was drifting off, he felt the slightly scruffy warmth of Jonathan's cheek come to rest on the top of his head, and it occurred to the boy that he hadn't been quite this comfortable in a long time--being in this man's arms was right in a way little else in this world was.   
  
That was how Martha found them hours later, both asleep and both smiling. She wondered what was going on behind their eyes, but she just adjusted the blanket around them, as she'd done a few short years ago, and went on about the business of waking up the farm. She didn't know that while her husband dreamed of Clark finding happiness and security and satisfaction in his own sense of self, her son slept and carried with him some of that security and sense of self, new and fresh and strengthening.  
  
It wasn't a huge secret, not anything he'd worry about hiding from anyone, but it was a secret he shared with his father alone, and that meant something. It also explained that hum in his bones. His father was right--Clark found it comforting to think that, alien or not, last son of a dead civilization or not, he existed in time with his greatest hero. Jonathan Kent was the strongest and bravest man Clark had ever met, and he would always be the standard to which Clark would hold himself. And now he knew that they shared something more elusive than blood. It wasn't a constant, but it was worth knowing, and it gave Clark something Jor-El could never offer--  
  
As long as Jonathan Kent lived, Clark Kent would never truly be alone. 


End file.
